Web

Nearly five years ago, my team at GeorgiaGov Interactive began a journey to migrate our enterprise web platform (hosting over 50 state agency websites at the time) away from a self-hosted model with a proprietary content management system to Drupal 7 and a cloud hosted environment. We were the first state to make such a bold shift, but we weren't the last.

Boston-based open source company Acquia has announced that it will provide US$500,000 to the community around the content management system Drupal, in order to help in the development of modules that add additional functionality.

Drupal is free software developed originally by Belgian Dries Buytaert (seen above) and released under the GNU General Public Licence. The Acquia move has been prompted by the rapid take-up of version 8 of Drupal and the funding will go towards modules for this version.

Servo is a cross-platform browser engine that will run on ARM operating systems (including Android) as well as on x64 platforms including Linux, OS X and Windows. It is designed to take advantage of parallelism in order to achieve optimum performance on today's multi-core systems.

Servo is coded in Rust, a language designed to ensure thread-safe concurrency and with a greater emphasis on security and safety than C++ – a language Mozilla says is poorly suited to preventing problems like memory bugs and data races.

The Vivaldi development team, through Ruarí Ødegaard, has announced today, March 10, 2016, the availability of the first snapshot build, for public testing, of the upcoming web browser since the release of the third Beta.

Vivaldi Snapshot 1.0.418.3 is, as expected, a bugfix release, as the final version of Vivaldi 1.0, which will also be the first stable build of the Chromium-based web browser, is just around the corner and might be unveiled this spring.

Following up from my last post, I’ve had some time to research and assess the current state of embedding Gecko. This post will serve as a (likely incomplete) assessment of where we are today, and what I think the sensible path forward would be. Please note that these are my personal opinions and not those of Mozilla. Mozilla are gracious enough to employ me, but I don’t yet get to decide on our direction.

The TLDR; there are no first-class Gecko embedding solutions as of writing.

Strap yourself in, this is a long post. It should be easy to skim, but the history may be interesting to some. I would like to make the point that, for a web rendering engine, being embeddable is a huge opportunity, how Gecko not being easily embeddable has meant we’ve missed several opportunities over the last few years, and how it would still be advantageous to make Gecko embeddable.

In the past week, the conversation about encryption has reached fever pitch. Encryption, Apple, and the FBI are in headlines around the world. And lively discussions about security and privacy are taking place around kitchen tables, on television, and in comment sections across the Internet.

Mozilla believes the U.S. government’s demand for Apple to circumvent their own security protections is a massive overreach. To require Apple to do this would set a dangerous precedent that threatens consumer security going forward. But this discussion is an opportunity to broaden public understanding of encryption. When people understand the role encryption plays in their everyday lives, we can all stand up for encryption when threats surface — this key issue related to the overall health of the Internet becomes mainstream.

Just a few moments ago, Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, informes users of the popular, Ubuntu-based distribution that the servers where the Linux Mint website is hosted have been hacked to point the download links to specially crafted ISOs.

According to Mr. Lefebvre, it appears that a group of hackers created a modified Linux Mint ISO, which included a backdoor. Then, they hacked into the Linux Mint website and modified the download links to trick users into downloading the malicious ISO image.

In this article, I introduce our new series—the Open Source interview—inviting you to suggest questions to ask our interviewees in a follow-up email interview. The first candidate is Li Gong, former president of Mozilla, who is now heading Acadine Technologies. They are busy launching H5OS, an open source platform for mobile and IoT.

According to a latest and lengthy post published by Kartikaya Gupta on the Mozilla Hacks website, it looks like the upcoming Firefox 46 web browser will finally bring smooth scrolling to the desktop.

Now, we don't know how many of you out there are experiencing scrolling issues when browsing various web pages on the Internet, but it appears to be a major problem if Mozilla is going to all the trouble of implementing smoother scrolling support into its popular Firefox web browser.

An offer of $1.2 billion was made today for the acquisition of Opera Software ASA by a Chinese equity investment fund.

Opera Software ASA announced today record revenues for the fourth quarter of 2015, and on the same day, it received a kr10.5 billion ($1.2 billion / €1.1 billion) buyout offer from a Chinese equity investment fund that's made up of several companies.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.